I was chatting with Pete Caputa earlier today. It was one of our usual fly-bys where we exchange a load of facts and jokes in about 20 seconds. I ended up launching into LinkedIn since I knew Pete uses it and I knew I was quite behind the times with it. After inviting Pete, he asks me if I know this guy Auren Hoffman.

Of course, I don’t know who he is. But damn should I have. For anyone that’s met me, or dared attend a networking event with me, they know that I can whore out quite quickly. It’s a skill that takes loads of time to develop and polish off. It’s not about the volume at all really, just about dissecting an encounter and understanding as much as possible from it. You never know if the next person you meet will change your life - why take it for granted?

Back to Auren. Well, Auren is quite the enterprising connector a la Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. Even more interesting/important, however, is that he’s leveraged it into a business - and a lucrative one at that. Who would have imagined that someone would outsource their own networking? Well it’s happening. Is it a trend that will grow? God I hope not. I’m still old fashioned in the belief that if people want to meet, they need to do it face-to-face, but I commend Auren’s work because it’s not impersonal like other technology-derived approaches.

Continuining with the look at how AJAX is “changing” the way web apps are being assembled, I thought it interesting to point out something that was once a problem in IE.

For years, IE supported “expando properties” which were essentially attributes that could be added to any element in the document. Personally, I used them all the time as they enabled really delicate interactions without the need for huge arrays of data in JS. Of course, later these were shunned by many because they resulted in your document not validating.

Recently, with the rise of AJAX techniques, I see there are many people adding properties onto their objects. In some cases, they are added as attributes. In other cases, I am seeing clever use of class names to convey some of that information (though that seems like a technique that won’t scale all that well).

I came across this link for a task list from the Ajaxian blog. It’s a really nice use of this technology. It also uses attribute stuffing.

Where do you all stand on this?

I came across an interesting article on News.com today titled “Blogs: The next big thing for advertisers?”. The article deals with the ways that blogs are being monetized, assuming that the technique is to mimic the broadcasting model:

Any group of bloggers can set up a network, as a group of liberal bloggers have done. Altogether, the Liberal Blog Advertising Network can provide an advertiser with a million or so page views a week in one fell swoop. The ads will appear on all the blogs maintained by members of the network, so they become a form of broadcasting, or blogcasting. Blog readership is demonstrably growing, and pretty soon such networks will be able to compete at least with cable television for ability to reach viewers.

News.com, “Blogs: The next big thing for advertisers?”

I think that this is an obvious answer to a difficult question. It leaves me still wondering, however, if the barrier to bigger and better blogging business models is really the distribution. Unfortunately, the fearful part is that they don’t control the message, the presentation and most problematic, the creator. The operative word here being control.

Ross Mayfield recently did a length analysis of the role of fear in corporate blogging (and social software). If you’ve not seen it, I’d recommend reading “Fear, Greed and Social Software”. It’s been shown time and time again that the people trying to co-opt the medium usually don’t get it. Isn’t it ironic that we’re more surprised that someone “gets it” than anything else?

But the worst part of getting the “big media” buy in, seems to be the disconnect in terms of what they are buying in to. I came across a great piece on The Long Tail Blog, “The dangers of ‘Headism’”, that hits on many of the issues with trying to force this square peg through the round hole. Though you should read the entire post, the section on Incentives is extremely relevant:

Likewise, the incentives for the producers and creators of these products change as you go from hits to niches; Madonna may be in it mostly for the money, but I sure wasn’t when I slapped a bass badly in my misspent twenties. Most authors, meanwhile, write books to find readers, not riches (although those readers can lead to lucrative consulting fees, speeches or tenure; books are powerful marketing vehicles for personal brands). And plenty of up-and-coming independent filmmakers would be only to happy to have their movies freely spread far and wide on bittorrent to build their reputation.

Source: The Long Tail Blog, “The dangers of ‘Headism’”

Yesterday, Seth Godin made a quick mention about Podcasting and what he saw as some of the main challenges with the medium, namely the long times to parse and consume. Of course, this initiated a small torrent of complaints from the podcasting afficionados that came to the side of their maiden.

Of course, I was sure Seth wasn’t dismissing the medium when I first read it. How could he be? I’m still waiting for my copy of his most recent book, All Marketers Are Liars, it seems that he focuses in on the art of storytelling and authenticity in communication. There’s no way he could be against it.

In fact, he’s not. Afterwards, he posted a follow-up that clarified his stance and points to what he thinks is great. He’s even linked to the first and only Godin Podcast there is.

Of course, what I think Seth really needs is to take his story on the road. More importantly, he should get Sparkcasting on board and let us put together a “Book Talk Show”. We’ve spent the past 5 months working on how to make conversation more discoverable and approachable.

Stay tuned for the first edition.

Steve Jobs has annouced that the upcoming 4.9 release of iTunes will provide support for podcasting. Jobs, speaking at the D3: Everything Digital conference, took a quick jab at Podcasting, framing it as “Wayne’s World-like”, but nonetheless also noted that they planned on having a gated directory for the podcasts.

It’s hard to make out all the facts at the moment, but it “feels” like the podcasting tab will work much like the radio listings. Users can submit their podcast for approval by Apple for inclusion. It only seems logical that iTunes users will be able to add their own podcasts as well. The big question in this arena is whether or not anyone can get listed in this new directory.

If I’m a developer of a “iPodder”, otherwise known as a podcatcher, I’d be shaking in my boots at the moment. If you’re not, give a quick ring to the fine folks at Konfabulator for a more up-to-date example of what could happen.

The flip-side of that conversation, however, is that podcasting is getting closer to reaching millions of people. As many have pointed out, and I largely agree, one of the major stumbling blocks to the adoption of podcasting is the initial download of the iPodder software. Although it seems that large numbers of people still use the web to physically download podcasts, the automation of the process is key. The model we have now is more akin to logging in to your web mail app and then going to the actual server where the message originated.

My next question is simple “Can the medium be easily dismissable once there are millions of aggregators out there?”.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in retreat mode working on the backend for the Sparkcasting system. It’s really a long, arduous process but certainly not one I’ve not walked before.

As I began to implement the system, I’ve started to implement some AJAX features into the design of the administration (and maybe into the front end as well). AJAX is certainly not new to me, I’ve been writing JS/DHTML via IFRAME for something like 7 years now and it was quite a bit of fun then too. Of course, now there’s a renewed interest in it seeing that the browser technology is better.

Since I’ve started, I find myself tripping over my own mind in many occassions. I’m not firm on this decision yet, but it seems best to implement the system fully WITHOUT AJAX before moving on to an AJAX-enhanced version. Why? To be lazy. I’ve got many questions that are arising and would like to get some feedback from others (especially my CF family):

• Template vs. CFC - AJAX makes use of lots of little validation checks and data retrieval routines. Are you bundling those into methods or fuseaction-like elements, or some hybrid? I’m using a hybrid since I have a public API and need re-use.

• Data Transport - AJAX provides a number of different ways to get data back to the client. In the past, I’ve simply generated JS in the IFRAME and called a function in the parent. I tried WDDX the first time out this time, but of course there was a problem. Apparently the WDDX libraries won’t work in both Netscape and IE at the same time.

  I’m currently messing with JSON and found this great library for making use of it in CF. Watch out that you will need to also use JSON.parse() to make it resolve properly.

• Backup Routines - This is by far the most annoying part in my book. It’s not all that new to us really, since we had to deal with client-side validation with server-side backup already. What’s changing is the nature of the form now. Whereas before we more often “knew” what the form looked like, with AJAX we find ourselves either getting back a much smaller form (in the case no JS was used) or a much larger form (in the case some JS was used).

  I’ll admit that my natural tendency is to be exclusionary in this regard. I don’t like to think of myself as a bastard, but what the heck ;) I’m leaning towards requring a certain level browser (note I did not say certain browser. In general, this will mean IE5.5+, Firebird/fox, and Safari if it behaves. How is everyone else dealing with the modern browsers?

• White Space - If you’re having problems with your returned data, make sure you check for generated white space. I’ve tried to remove it all but the hunt is still on.

There’s plenty more I could offer, but I’ll stop here. As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words so here’s a quick screen grab. In this particular shot, I’ve tried to save the new row (with no data) and the validation routine told me I wasn’t too bright ;):

It seems the podcasting world is quickly dividing into two main camps: the artists and the capitalists. Those are gross, blatant exaggerations, but they’ll serve their purpose. I’m definitely more in the capitalist camp, though I fully can understand where the people who want to keep it “clean” are coming for. For me, it seems inevitable that the “marketplace” will bear down on us all.

With that in mind, I decided that it would be great to create a place for those that are business-minded to, well, talk business. To that end, I started the podbiz group today. It’s chartered to be a meeting place and discussion forum for anyone that’s trying to find a living in this podcasting thang. Naturally, anyone is welcome to join and participate.

I did a quick interview with Alex Williams today which should be posted as a podcast sooner than later.

In the meantime, if you are interested in building a business around podcasting please join the group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/podbiz
podbiz@yahoogroups.com

It’s so strange being home.. really. I’ve been on the road so much lately it almost feels uneasy being back in NYC. But, as usual, there’s never time for rest.

Tonight, to the best of my knowledge, Channel 5 (KPIX) will be airing their piece on Podcasting. I did a good interview with them a couple of weeks ago and I’m suspecting that it will get included in this piece. Naturally, this created a new pressure point for me - the site.

When I did the interview, they were zoomed in on the site for a few parts. Of course, it wasn’t the site, just the local development version I was running (the production site was a sliver of what was planned). Well, it’s one step closer today.

I’ve been working mostly on getting the legacy stuff over (never thought I would be the owner of legacy data). In any event, the previous Beercasts have finally been imported and the site migrated to run on the database.

So what’s new in this version?

• New Home Page - I was forced to throw up a simple page before with just a screenshot. Now, that screenshot has been replaced with the real thing.

  This page has a lot going on, so I’ll name the sections. The right column has a listing of the Recent Casts and Recent Shows. Midway through the page is a listing of the next 3 events. Further down are the more recent news items.

• Show Home Pages - Previously, the shows were hosted on their own pages, but it was quite annoying to deal with to tell the truth. I’ve moved to something that I think is a lot easier to use (and easy on the eyes).

  Down the left, you’ll find the summary of the show. The middle column has a listing of the topics. Clicking on a topic title shows the SparkCasts associated with that topic for the episode. The right column has a navigator to move through episodes of the show as well as links to RSS feeds for both the show and the topic being viewed.

  One nice thing is that now each episode has its own URL. This will make linking to an episode really easy. They all follow the format - http://sparkcasting.com/shows/[showAlias]/episodes/[episodeID]

• Show Guides - RSS - If you’re interested in knowing when a show gets updated, that’s simpler than ever. Each show has it’s own RSS feed that contains each of the episodes associated with that show. Subscribe away!

• Episode Guides - Playlist - If you’ve wanted to listen to everything from a specific episode, it’s pretty simple to do now. Each episode has a M3U playlist located in the root.

  For example, http://sparkcasting.com/shows/nyc-squad/episodes/3/index.m3u will give you all the casts for Episode 3.

• Topic Cards - RSS - SparkCasting is a topic-centric talk show. As a result, we’re more than happy to see our topics shared with others. To make this easier, we’re making it quite simple to get a hold of the full data for a topic.

  If you are looking for the Topic Card, you can point your browser to http://sparkcasting.com/topics/[topicID]/index.xml

• Topic Guides - RSS - This was the promise all along with this system. The idea is that you can build your own show by subscribing to the TOPICS that you like. You don’t have to like an entire show, unless you really do ;)

  The Topic RSS feeds now are connected and contain a blend of the casts that cover the topic across shows. Previously, they only listed the casts from the specific show. To get a Topic Feed, you simply point your browser to http://sparkcasting.com/topics/[topicID]/recent.casts.xml

Well, there’s a ton more to come, but that’s what I got done in the last few days. Version 0.3 will most likely be up some time next week. Have to get some old new shows posted first.